ABSTRACT
A museum of emptied fjords and long-lost villages emerges from the remote corners of the Faroe Islands. In Newfoundland, a forgotten settlement holds its evaporating memories close while the world swirls in the distance. Iceland’s distant Hornstrandir peninsula watches its old herring factories and abandoned farms fade into an unremembered past. All around us the soon-to-be-invisible cultural landscapes get swallowed up by a networked world gone global. This chapter examines the cultural relevance and historical significance of the agency of ruins. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic fieldwork in the isolated and abandoned rural places of North America and the North Atlantic, I aim to reimagine these locations as dynamic, generative museums and sites of artistic, touristic and academic engagement. How might we begin to understand these sites as markers of a complex and storied cultural history? Far from so-called ruin porn, this inquiry offers the potential for rethinking the social and cultural importance of ruins in situ. This piece represents a preliminary attempt to provide a real-world toolkit for developing an everyday ethnography of ruination. Cultural heritage exists beyond the museum, beyond the curator, and beyond the edge of our known world.
